It was not that Dane had nothing. Twice in the round's middle minute he adjusted — she felt the adjustment the way you feel a draught change — and cut his combinations shorter, and once, working off a feint that was genuinely clever, he got his left hand through at an angle his team had plainly drilled for her, and it landed, if it landed, on the high curve of her guard, and the sound of it on the glove was the loudest contact of the night so far. A roar tried to start. It died politely, because the blow had moved nothing: not her feet, not her head, not the expression, insofar as anyone at distance could read it, of a woman who had been taking punches on her guard since before the young man was born and had filed this one under weather. He reset. She let him. Somewhere behind her, Barlow said nothing at all, which was his loudest form of approval.
Dane felt it too. She could see him feel it, the way you can see a fighter hearing the room change sides — not sides, exactly; the room had not chosen her against him, it had chosen the thing she was doing over the thing he had promised, and for a young man whose entire adulthood had been applause, the distinction was a new and disorienting country. He pressed harder. The last thirty seconds he came in behind everything, behind the jab doubled and redoubled, behind a right hand thrown with genuine intent to end the matter of the first round at least in statement — and she slipped it, and rolled, and the counter that came off the roll was the lightest punch of the night, a left hand that touched his chest as he passed, almost a steadying hand, almost the hand you put out to a man running past you in a corridor to say: carefully, the floor is wet.
The brass bell ended it. The sound went through the hall and the hall answered it standing, eight hundred people on their feet for a round in which perhaps nineteen scoring punches had been thrown, and landed, all of them hers or none of them anyone's, a round with no knockdown, no blood, no moment for the highlight reels — only a woman of fifty-two standing in the centre of a ring she had arrived at before he did, breathing through her nose, composed, while the young champion crossed to his corner with his gloves low and an expression on his face that his team had never seen there: not hurt. Thinking.
Barlow met her with the stool and the water and the sixty seconds of a cornerman's liturgy, and his face, when she sat, was doing several things at once, the way faces do at the edge of great age and great satisfaction.
"Sentences," he said, putting the bottle to her lips. "You are writing paragraphs out there, Greta. That last bit, with the hand on his chest — what in God's name was that?"
"Professional courtesy," she said. "He was going past me. It seemed rude not to acknowledge him."
Behind Barlow, beyond the ropes, the hall was still loud with its new feeling, and Freya was on her feet at the corridor door with both hands over her mouth, and Diane was standing too, applauding with the measured force of a woman who has bet the building on decency and is watching the bet come in — and across the ring, in the other corner, Rick Sorensen was talking very fast into Dane Whitaker's ear, the whole folder's worth of the next two minutes, while Dane, looking past his manager at the woman in the plain top taking water in the plain corner, shook his head once, slowly, to nobody, and said something that the ringside microphones did not catch and the lip-readers argued about for a week.
What he said was: "She's not there."
And then, a second later, as the stool came away and the crowd re-seated itself in a hush of anticipation that had nothing left in it of spectacle at all: "She's never there."
The bell for the second round found Dane Whitaker already standing, and there was something in the way he stood that Barlow recognised from the far side of the ring, the way a man stands when he has stopped listening to the fight in front of him and started listening to the noise in his own head. He had predicted a second-round finish at the press conference, out of habit, the words leaving his mouth before he had weighed them, and the whole room had heard him say it, and the sponsors had heard him say it, and now the second round had arrived like an appointment he had made in public and could not postpone. Greta watched him from across the ring with her gloves up and her chin down, and she understood him better in that moment than his own corner did. She had been twenty-three in Gothenburg when she had first learned what a prediction does to a fighter. It does not frighten the other person. It frightens you. It turns every passing second into evidence against you, and it makes a cautious man hurry, and hurrying, she had known for thirty years, is the one luxury a fighter cannot afford against someone who does not hurry at all.